The road to Virginia Episcopal School was more secluded in those days, winding a few miles from the white section of segregated Lynchburg through a wood of maple and oak to the school’s rolling campus, shielded by trees and the more distant Blue Ridge Mountains. The usual stream of cars navigated the bends on the first day of school, white families ferrying their adolescent sons. Like nearly every other elite prep school in the South, it had been the boarding school’s tradition since its founding in 1916 that its teachers guide white boys toward its ideal of manhood — erudite, religious, resilient. But that afternoon of Sept. 8, 1967, a taxi pulled up the long driveway carrying a black teenager, Marvin Barnard. He had journeyed across the state, 120 miles by bus, from the black side of Richmond, unaccompanied, toting a single suitcase. In all of Virginia, a state whose lawmakers had responded to the 1954 court-ordered desegregation of public schools with a strategy of declared “massive resistance,” no black child had ever enrolled in a private boarding school. When Marvin stepped foot on V.E.S. ground, wearing a lightweight sport jacket, a white dress shirt, a modest necktie and a cap like the ones the Beatles were wearing, the white idyll was over.

Marvin had just turned 14 when he arrived, and at a little over five feet tall and 100 pounds, he was a tiny thing. His face was boyishly open, eyes and mouth big and bright, black hair that grew in waves toward a lopsided widow’s peak. His skin was yellow-brown. Marvin had the spirit of a bouncing ball, and back home in Richmond he’d kept his classmates and teachers laughing. In all his years of schooling, he’d never earned a grade other than A. The old couple who raised him, his aunt and uncle, had given him a dime for each perfect report, but money wasn’t Marvin’s motivation. He lived to please them, and after his aunt died when he was 12, Marvin lived to please his uncle. Going off to V.E.S. had delighted him and just about everyone else. “The neighbors and the other kids, they were just excited,” Marvin recalled. “The thing that gave me such a rush was that I could see it in their eyes. It’s like: ‘Well, you go, and you show them. You show them what you can do. You show them for us.’”

Another black boy, Bill Alexander, had also been sent that year. Bill had traveled by jet from his hometown, Nashville, to Washington and then on to Lynchburg aboard a propeller plane. He, too, was alone, though he brought more bags than Marvin, coming as he did from Nashville’s black middle class. At the airport, Bill hailed a taxi driven by a black cabby. “To Virginia Episcopal School,” Bill told him. But those were impossible words to the man’s ears. He took Bill to a black Baptist seminary instead. “I told the man, ‘No, I’m going to Virginia Episcopal School on V.E.S. Road,’” Bill told me. “He kinda looked at me. I must have said it two, three, four times before he drove all the way up to V.E.S.”

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Marvin BarnardCreditAwol Erizku for The New York Times

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Jerrauld JonesCreditAwol Erizku for The New York Times

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Greg PrioleauCreditAwol Erizku for The New York Times

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Bill AlexanderCreditAwol Erizku for The New York Times

Bill and Marvin were part of a quiet but strategic experiment, funded by a private organization called the Stouffer Foundation, to instill in Southern white elites a value then broadly absent: a visceral and compelling belief in the societal benefits of integration. From the beginning, the boys were a pair, one hardly seen without the other, one name seldom said without the other to follow. Bill and Marvin. Marvin and Bill. To their white classmates and teachers, each existed as one half of a singular whole: the new black boys on campus. Bill was more reserved than his roommate (of course they would have to room together), with the look of someone holding something back, behind bespectacled eyes and a half smile. He was six months older than Marvin, seven inches taller, 35 pounds heavier and his skin several shades darker. His face had already taken a turn toward manliness. A Presbyterian minister’s first child, Bill was preppy before he knew what preppy was. A teacher would nickname the new duo Fire and Ice: Marvin, warmblooded, with his heart on his sleeve; Bill so confident and cool.

That same fall, four other Stouffer students broke the racial barrier at Saint Andrew’s School in Boca Raton, Fla. Another three enrolled in the Asheville School in the mountains of western North Carolina. Three more went to the Westminster School on Atlanta’s affluent north side. Twenty students in all integrated seven schools, a teenage vanguard that left black America for the wealthiest white enclaves. Not all of them made it. But each year that followed, a new class came. The privately financed experiment would become a turning point in elite high school education in the South, and it would test, in very real terms, how much a black child could achieve in a white environment and the price he would have to pay.

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Virginia Episcopal School in the 1960s.CreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

Black people had emerged from slavery with an almost religious zeal for education. Historians note the intense and frequent anger of the freed for having been denied literacy. “There is one sin that slavery committed against me, which I can never forgive,” wrote James Pennington, a former slave who escaped in 1828. “It robbed me of my education.” Their collective desire for learning drove the first great mass movement for state-run public education in the South. Between the 1890s and 1915, white philanthropists supported public schools and school boards for black children, ostensibly as an avenue for black advancement. But it was also an investment in subjugation. Philanthropists tended to support vocational schools for black people that prepared them for unskilled, low-wage labor, to the exclusion of the liberal-arts education that was open to white people. The very concept of elite private high school education was developed to provide whites an alternative to those public schools, with the effect of maintaining class divide and long-held power structures. James Dillard, a prominent educator who supported the founding of Virginia Episcopal School, was also the director of a philanthropic effort to expand schooling for black people. For white students and for his own sons, Dillard supported V.E.S.’s nurturing of mind, body and spirit. For blacks: “three years of high school work emphasizing the arts of homemaking and farm life.”

Black leaders debated the merits of educating an elite leadership class versus more broad-based common schooling, a divide famously personified by W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. At the beginning of the 20th century, Washington endorsed a more utilitarian model of education, including trade schools and workshops for industrial training. Du Bois’s approach was characterized by the term “talented tenth,” which he borrowed from a Northern philanthropist and used to describe the cadre of highly educated blacks who would lift other black people up, an ideal that grew deep roots in the culture. In 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to enroll his son in an all-white prep school in Atlanta but was refused. The change would have to start within the white community.

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Jerrauld JonesCreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

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Greg PrioleauCreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

Anne Forsyth, an heiress of the North Carolina Cannon and Reynolds families, traveled in Winston-Salem’s emerging white liberal circles in the mid-’60s. One of her sons went to a Northern prep school that had long accepted black students, and Forsyth noticed that racial integration was beginning to occur almost everywhere except the prep schools of the South. An idea took hold of her. What would society look like if she exposed young wealthy white students to black scholarship students? Would the South change if its future leaders were socialized to be less bigoted? Her aim, using a few token blacks to mend the South’s racial divide from the top down, was utopian to say the least. It was also novel, a systematic effort by whites to help rid other whites of their prejudices. Providing a better life for black students was secondary.

They wouldn’t choose just any black students. Forsyth started the Stouffer Foundation, named for her mother, and hired a small team of like-minded white colleagues who toured the South coaxing schools to open their doors to blacks and scouting black public schools for exceptional students. In the years after Brown v. Board of Education, new private schools popped up around the South, and older private schools expanded enrollment. The schools gave such reasons for their growth as “quality education,” “Christian atmosphere,” “discipline” and “college preparation,” but mostly they were academies with nostalgia for the Jim Crow South, schools to which white families fled in order to avoid integrated public schools. Thirteen years after the Supreme Court ruling made school segregation unconstitutional, the Stouffer Foundation quietly sent off its first class.

V.E.S.’s headmaster, a New Englander named Austin Montgomery, agreed to accept Bill and Marvin over the objections of many parents and members of the school’s board. “Why, why, why have you done this cruel thing to our beloved school?” one parent wrote. “A private boarding school like V.E.S. is an extension, a part of the family,” another wrote. “We have no intention whatsoever of integrating those of another race into our family.” The school’s tract of land had been part of a working slave plantation until Emancipation. In the years before Bill and Marvin arrived, V.E.S. tore down the remaining slave cabin on the grounds. Their dormitory bedroom looked out on Jett Hall, the campus’s main building, and from their windows, the campus spread out over 160 acres, with Georgian Revival buildings cropping out of red clay and open green space. The only other black faces belonged to the hired help, like the beloved custodian, Robert Thomas, son of a man named Paul, who had worked at the school in the old days as one of the white-coated waiters who served white boys in the dining room.

Marvin and Bill each came to V.E.S. with a belief that the civil rights movement was his to bear, and that the way to bear it was by proving himself in the classroom. Bill, the preacher’s son, had seen the movement up close in meetings at his father’s church. Marvin’s inspiration came from black cultural figures, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. “We recognized that being the black kids, everything we did was going to be under scrutiny,” Marvin said. That meant no sneaking off campus, stealing away with girls or missing class. “It would go beyond us as individuals, and they would say: ‘This is what all black kids do. This is what the black race would do.’ Representing yourself as an individual and then being a representative of your people — as I went through school, that became a struggle.”

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Johnny HollowayCreditAwol Erizku for The New York Times

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Terry SherrillCreditAwol Erizku for The New York Times

Freshmen at V.E.S. were called “new boys” or, worse, “rats,” and all were subject to hazing: fetching things for upperclassmen or doing their laundry. Bill and Marvin accepted their places at the bottom of the hierarchy, assuming that status was based on seniority and not skin color, despite some of their white classmates’ reminding them otherwise. “You might hear individuals use the N-word while you’re walking down the hall, and you turn around, and nobody would say anything,” Marvin told me. “Or you may see something scribbled on the desk.”

Montgomery, the headmaster, was a near-perfect archetype of the patrician Northerner, with smart eyeglasses and an old smoking pipe always between his teeth. He kept watch over his new charges from his office window. Just weeks into their freshman year, he informed the Stouffer Foundation of a first triumph: “As I write, the two are playing touch with a dozen others out on the lovely front campus — a use to which I always like to see it put. The game goes on without regard to the usual stream of Sunday visitors and sightseers.” Calling Bill and Marvin by their last names, Montgomery wrote, “I thought you might be interested that Friday, unbeknownst to me, the freshmen held class elections, in which Alexander was chosen president by a solid majority — of which Barnard was not one!”

With uncanny speed, Bill and Marvin did just what they set out to do, rushing to the head of the class while shaking up racial allegiances, seldom losing their footing, the path they raced along hewing so closely to the one they’d imagined. A few more weeks into the school year, faculty members posted student rankings on a bulletin board, as they did at the end of every grading period. When the freshman boys pressed up against the bulletin board in their jackets and ties, they saw Bill and Marvin at the top of their class, ahead of all 40-some white boys. “I wanted to get their badges,” Marvin told me. “That became one of my mottos. I want to get what you say is good, so that you have to say I’m good.”

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Tony JohnsonCreditAwol Erizku for The New York Times

It’s possible that the stars aligned for the Stouffer Foundation’s experiment during the first months of Marvin and Bill’s time at school. “Divine intervention,” Bill calls it now. A high point came on the baseball field, where Bill attracted the attention of white boys at another school, the prestigious Woodberry Forest, which had previously refused the foundation’s request to desegregate. Forsyth, the heiress and philanthropist, later spoke about the incident: “Now, I don’t know what Bill said to these boys, but the next day during chapel, the head of student government asked Mr. Duncan” — Woodberry’s headmaster — “if they were supposed to be leaders in the South scholastically, socially and athletically, why weren’t they leaders in integration?” So Woodberry’s headmaster accepted three Stouffer students, the program growing by word of mouth.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Bill and Marvin were in their dorm room when news came over the radio that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed. The movement’s leader was dead, and they were away from home. “I’m standing in the room,” Marvin recalled. “Bill is in the room. And then we hear nothing but — I mean, it’s like the whole doggone dorm was celebrating and laughing and whooping. And I looked at Bill, and I’m just like, ‘No, this is not gonna happen this way.’ I went out into the hallway, and I looked up and down the hallway, and I yelled out that if anybody thinks that this is funny, then come out of your rooms now and tell me. I wasn’t the biggest guy around or nothing like that. But they could feel I wasn’t taking no mess. And there was quiet.”

Late that night, Montgomery, having heard the uproar himself, as had other faculty members who lived in the dorms, assembled the pajama-clad boys in the chapel to admonish them. “This is not who we are,” he told them, invoking the school’s motto, “Toward Full Stature,” which was on a crest above the chapel door. If this seems an obvious response, it was not in the South at that time. To Bill and Marvin, two among hundreds, Montgomery was a hero at that hour. But that night was a turning point for them. It was as if they’d been picked up off their feet and set down in another place, and from their new vantage point, light didn’t shine as brightly toward harmony. “We had made some miscalculations about how people felt in their hearts,” Marvin said. “That took some of the smile off of my face.”

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Marvin Barnard during his freshman year.CreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

Marvin spent the summer at home in Richmond. His uncle, whom he called “father,” had been sick, and Marvin decided that he would rather stay there to care for him than return to V.E.S. He and his uncle were at home on a hot July night, when his uncle told him: “You’re a kid. But you’re really like a little man. And you really are a man tonight.” Moments later, Marvin heard a gasp, the sound of his uncle’s last breath. “I think in many ways he allowed himself to die so he would not hold me back from the opportunity,” Marvin told me. “And from that moment, I did what I had to do.”

Headmaster Montgomery sent Marvin a letter expressing his condolences and harked back to the night King was killed. “I think you took hold of what could have been a difficult situation this past year and handled it manfully, in the very best sense of that word. You did yourself great credit. I hope that you had a happy year and one you think was profitable. Probably you did at least as much for V.E.S. as it did for you.”

But Montgomery never recovered the confidence of the school’s faithful after going against their will. He resigned before the start of Bill and Marvin’s sophomore year, and the school replaced him with the assistant headmaster, a Southerner. By that time, Montgomery had accepted two more Stouffer scholars, Johnny Holloway, from Durham, N.C., and Jerrauld Jones, from Norfolk, Va., assuring them and their parents that they would be looked after. He asked others at the school, including the football coach, to fulfill his promise.

The Stouffer Foundation continued its work. Forsyth, after providing seed money, faded into the background, giving management of the operation to John Ehle, a North Carolina novelist turned public-policy idea man. Ehle, before the 1968 school year, traveled to Knoxville, Richmond and Greensboro in search of talented black students, asking school counselors for their best and brightest. To the students and parents he met, many of whom had never had a white person in their home, Ehle must have seemed an apparition. He kept a file for nearly every one of the 140 Stouffer scholars, who eventually included girls, Native Americans and Latinos. Many files include audio recordings of his and others’ interviews with them. Ehle asked one student about his experience with integration.

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John Ehle and wife Rosemary Harris in the 1960s.CreditFrom Rosemary Harris

“Well, several summers ago, I went to a camp that was integrated,” he answered. “But other than that, I haven’t been in contact very much with, um, many white boys and girls.”

“You don’t really have any dislike for them, though, do ya?” Ehle asked.

“No. I don’t understand why Negroes and whites don’t get along.”

Of Jerrauld Jones, one of the second pair of black boys to go to V.E.S., a Stouffer report said that he is “an affable, intelligent young boy.” It continued: “He at least appeared almost oblivious to the idea of personal problems relating to race. He’s right. He’ll be accepted for being himself.” In his roommate Johnny’s file, there is a letter from Johnny addressed to Anne Forsyth: “I realize that a huge responsibility will be resting upon my shoulders but I feel as though I can hold it.”

Like Bill and Marvin, Jerrauld and Johnny and Stouffer’s second class of scholarship recipients were required to attend an eight-week crash course in prep-school manners and academics, covering everything from how to hold a tennis racket to a reading list of “Huckleberry Finn,” the “Odyssey” and Robert Frost. Civil rights leaders including Vernon Jordan and Julian Bond were recruited to advise them. And Forsyth herself addressed them with the story of Bill’s ballgame, which for her embodied the Stouffer experiment’s ideal — by simple exposure, racial barriers fell away. Forsyth did not tell the students stories of the four boys who didn’t make it that first year, including one boy whose white classmates at another Southern prep school held him outside a third-floor dormitory window by his ankles. It’s possible that she didn’t know about him.

When school started in 1968, American politics again pushed onto the secluded campus at V.E.S. An avowed segregationist, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, was running for president, and Confederate battle flags were on display. “The expectations were high when Johnny and Jerrauld came,” Marvin said. “Bill and I knew that they would be viewed collectively as we were, as the blacks in the school.”

Each took one under his wing. Marvin agreed to look after Jerrauld. “You know, Jerrauld’s a good guy,” he told me. “A great guy. But in my opinion at the time, he wasn’t from my background. He’s from a middle-class background, and to me he wasn’t tough enough. And I saw guys, white guys, trying to take advantage of him in terms of, you know, bullying him. I’m like, ‘No, ’cause if they feel that they can bully you, then they can bully the rest of us, and they may think they can bully black people, and that’s not going to happen here.’”

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Johnny HollowayCreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

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Terry SherrillCreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

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Tony JohnsonCreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

Bill and Marvin decided that the best way to respond to the exultation they saw after King was killed was to outpace the whites. It was not enough to outrank their classmates by a few decimal points; it had to be clear and unquestionable who was best. So they pulled away. Bill and Marvin were the top two students in their class their entire four years at V.E.S. They became the head counselors in the dorm. They were on the football team, which won a state prep-school championship, the first integrated team to do so, a year before the public-school team made famous by “Remember the Titans.” “Those white boys knew,” Marvin told me.

Each year, the number of black students grew. Their junior year, two more came: Terry Sherrill, from Huntersville, N.C., a small town north of Charlotte, and Greg Prioleau, from Washington. Terry’s eighth-grade teacher asked him to take a battery of tests, and only later did he learn what they were for. His father worked in a warehouse, and his mother as a nurse’s assistant. He had a sense of the civil rights movement from having gone to the March on Washington in 1963, sitting on his father’s shoulders. “All of that helped mold me,” he said. “When it came to V.E.S., I was determined that I was going to do my absolute best. And I don’t think there was a quarter when I wasn’t No.1.”

His roommate, Greg, said: “My parents, being very Christian, they looked at it as a blessing. You don’t give back blessings that the Lord gives you.” Neither even considered prep schools before the foundation discovered them. “I don’t think that any of us, my family included, understood the racial component of it,” Greg said. “That was hidden from us. I had never been around white folks before.”

In Bill and Marvin’s march toward graduation, they expanded their little movement, insisting that the others keep it going, make it bigger. Year after year, they watched the project repeat itself. In Marvin and Bill’s senior year, the foundation sent one student to V.E.S., Tony Johnson, from Richmond, who shared a room with Terry and Greg. They felt more and more that they were operating not just on V.E.S.’s campus, but in history. “I used to always say that going to V.E.S. is bigger than you,” Marvin said. In 1970, the black students named themselves the Magnificent Seven, after the western film featuring seven gunfighters who protect a Mexican village from marauding bandits. They met at night to rally one another. Group dynamics took over; the white kids had numbers and dominant culture on their side. The seven operated as symbols, as representatives for all black people. How that changed the white people, if it did, is hard to say.

Marvin, who came from Richmond’s slum, changed the way he carried himself. “There’s certain things that a preacher’s son can’t say and do,” he told me. “But there’s certain things a boy from the hood can say and do.” He grew an Afro to add inches to his frame. Now his classmates couldn’t overlook his blackness. He took on the garb of black nationalism, wearing dashikis over his shirt and tie and menace on his face. “If we’re gonna have some members that were friends of K.K.K. and the Confederates or whatever, they gotta know that there’s somebody here that may be a little bit on that Black Panther side,” Marvin said. “That was my role.”

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John Ehle and wife Rosemary Harris.CreditAwol Erizku for The New York Times

Bill quietly shone in the classroom and on the athletic field. Marvin, after trailing Bill in the academic rankings for three years, decided that in their final year he would best Bill. “I said: ‘Bill, you know I love you like a brother. But you’re not going to sweep me.’” It was Marvin’s understanding that the senior with the highest grade-point average for the year gave the valedictory speech, and as the sharpest edge of the Magnificent Seven, Marvin wanted his classmates and their families to have to look at him with his Afro. “I wanted them to understand the difference of somebody coming from what they perceive as poverty and a broken home and disadvantaged, that this person could be on top of your son, sons of congressmen, corporate men, lawyers, all that. I had something to say.” Marvin finally beat Bill that year. They finished first and second. Then Marvin’s faculty adviser came to his room, and he found out that Bill, who had the highest average over four years, would be giving the address. Marvin felt the school had chosen ice over fire. “I didn’t say anything, but I was hurt,” Marvin told me.

Still, one of Marvin’s proudest moments at V.E.S. was on graduation day in 1971, looking up at his roommate. There, on a bright spring morning, Bill criticized his fellow students’ indifference to life outside their privileged bubble. “My hope is for V.E.S. to accept the challenge of developing a new lifestyle, a new atmosphere, a new microcosm in which life is given more perspective besides the one-sided affluent one,” he said calmly at the end of the speech. “The challenge for V.E.S. is to create a new spirit, to perforate the buildings of this campus. I hope that movement continues.”

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Bill Alexander (front row, left) and members of the 1967-1968 V.E.S. varsity baseball team, the Bishops.CreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

In October 2016, the 100th anniversary of the founding of V.E.S., the school invited people from across the school’s history back to Lynchburg. The festivities opened with an address by the present headmaster, G.Thomas Battle Jr., to a few hundred in the school’s new theater, during which Battle saluted Bill and Marvin for desegregating the school. Bill and Marvin — both now 64 and physicians — appeared very much the grown-up versions of their younger selves, Bill with his quiet reserve and Marvin ever jovial, each with the silver and heft of age. Battle asked them, along with the other Stouffer scholars, to rise and accept a round of applause. Five of the seven were there: Tony Johnson’s absence was a surprise, but no one expected Johnny, who had disappeared from their lives decades before.

The Magnificent Seven hadn’t all gotten together since Bill and Marvin’s graduation in 1971. As five of them moved around campus, I watched them swing between their past and present selves, between adolescent horseplay and a 60-something’s sense of a long life lived. In many ways, V.E.S.’s campus looks as it did 50 years ago. The chapel, the bell tower and the old dormitories still stand. In Jett Hall, there’s a permanent display honoring Bill and Marvin, featuring their freshman and senior yearbook photos.

They had come to realize how much the seven had sacrificed. The feeling was acute in the company of their white classmates, who with age also realized what the Stouffer scholars went through; some were moved to tears. At a cocktail reception, I sat with the former roommates Greg and Terry and a couple of their classmates. “Terry and Greg had a lot more pressure on them going through V.E.S. — don’t you think?” Rick Scruggs asked. “Terry and Greg couldn’t hang and do the things we did.” I asked him what that meant. “Like going out and drinking. They had more pressure on them to toe the line and be successful. We were all kinda stupid sometimes.”

“We had each other,” said Greg, who studied at Northeastern and then Stanford and is now a project manager at a construction firm. “We knew where we were, understanding the time in America we were in. And all this stuff might have been going on over our head. Like, what was going down at the river?” Weed smoking, apparently. Terry, a trial lawyer now, didn’t know either.

I bumped into Jerrauld at the barbecue lunch. We talked about how Ehle seemed to have a certain kind of person in mind when he picked them — resilient. “Don’t get it wrong,” Jerrauld said. “There was a lot of ugliness, hostility, overt and covert, that we had to endure here.” But he said the past looks rosier with time. Jerrauld went to Princeton and on to law school at Washington and Lee; he is now a state judge in Virginia, after having served in the State Legislature for 14 years and as a member of a governor’s cabinet for three.

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From left: Johnny Holloway (partially obscured), Terry Sherrill, and Greg Prioleau at the 1969-70 Prep League championship game against St. Christopher’s.CreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

It was hard to walk a few paces with Marvin and Bill without an old classmate stopping them to offer a pat on the back. Like Terry, Bill has served on the V.E.S board and has kept in touch with black students, and he has also endowed a scholarship that bears his name. We talked at the football game about black students at the school today, and he said that at times they struggled to find their place.

Marvin leaned in. “One of the problems I experienced in those times was my own personal identity versus being a representative of an entire race.” After V.E.S, Marvin was ready to move on. Unlike Bill, who chose to go to Harvard, Marvin went to Howard, the elite university known to many as the black Harvard, “to further define who I was, rather than for another race who blacks were. I had to learn more myself.”

As the football game blared, Bill asked me how my high school experience compared with his. I’m an alumnus of a program called A Better Chance, which was started in Atlanta a few years before the Stouffer Foundation and at the time provided scholarships for black students to attend prep schools in the North. Now it helps send 2,000 students to nearly 350 schools nationwide.

But my education was something different from Bill and Marvin’s, not so connected to a movement and more about personal enrichment and attaining traditional measures of success. After going to public elementary and middle schools, I went to a private high school in Atlanta, my hometown, and on to Harvard, where I met Bill’s son. But I was always one of a select few black students. That is not the integration ideal. Sometimes I feel a yearning, something that I imagine some children of immigrants must feel, ones who weren’t taught their parents’ language and culture. Why didn’t my parents, my father in particular, who was a radical, a “race man,” ground me in any of that language? I’ve had the feeling lately that that oppositional posture should have been my inheritance — but my parents were focused on other things. “I wasn’t trying to do something for society; I was trying to do something for our black child,” my father told me recently. “It was a mistake not to have more conversations about the movement.” I’m finding that with age and the political climate in this country, I’m picking up the language on my own.

I interviewed dozens of Stouffer scholars before focusing on the story of the Magnificent Seven, and in those interviews, I saw this ambivalence in many of the scholars. Many seemed pleased with their professional success, but it had come at a cost. I recall one conversation I had with a very successful Stouffer alum, who told me that he goes back and forth between being incredibly thankful for his educational experience and wanting to “burn the whole system down.” Some of the scholars value how easily they can move in and out of white social circles; they appreciate the exposure to wealth in America. Others felt that the project, and their role in it, was an assault on their blackness.

At the centennial, the others kept asking me: Where’s Johnny? Have you been able to catch up with Johnny? He hadn’t returned to V.E.S. since 1973, when he went back to watch Terry and Greg graduate. “Did he just move on, or was there some other reason?” Greg said. “That’s what we can’t figure out. We are trying to figure out what went through his mind. Those four years. You can’t just throw them away. That was the bridge that took you from a child to a man.”

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Tony Johnson (left) during his senior year with members of the Honor Committee.CreditFrom Virginia Episcopal School

Johnny is a pastor now at Durham’s Cup of Salvation Deliverance Church, which sits in a strip mall just off a busy thoroughfare outside the city center, sharing a huge parking lot with a bingo hall, a day care center and a nail salon. He greeted me at the door in March in slacks and a knit shirt that met neatly amid his belly. A couple hundred chairs lined the carpeted floors, and the walls, painted a rich blue, were stenciled in bold fonts with various names for Christ: the Alpha and the Omega, the Lily of the Valley, the Resurrection and the Light.

He wanted to explain his absence from the reunion, but our conversation started where so many of my conversations started, with Bill and Marvin. “These guys were on a different level,” Johnny told me. “Imagine being Michael Jordan’s little brother coming to play for the Bulls the year after they won their first championship. On the one hand, people go: ‘Your last name’s Jordan. O.K.’ But if you can’t jump and shoot and all that as well as he can, then pretty soon the comparison is not favorable.” Speaking of himself and Jerrauld, he said, “I think that the fact that we didn’t blow the doors off the way that they did was almost a relief to everybody else around there.”

Johnny recalled some of the traditions at V.E.S., which for him harked back to segregation and slavery and reminded him of insults he’d seen his elders suffer. He was shocked by the fact that the students called their teachers “master”; the leader of the school was the headmaster. “I wasn’t calling anybody ‘master.’” He spoke with a measured cadence, his voice deep and round, slowly enough for his words to hang in the room but without much emotion. “That just was not going to happen. I would call them ‘mister.’ It wasn’t well received initially, because it felt like I was trying to buck their system.”

He bristled at the school’s hierarchy. Every mealtime, also by tradition, the students sat around a dining table with an instructor and his family, who lived on campus. There were usually eight to a table, including a senior, a junior, a sophomore and a freshman who was often supposed to set the table and clear all the dishes. “I’m like, you know, we’re all sitting there eating. I did it yesterday. You do it today. I had this chip on my shoulder, where, you know, I don’t want to be seen as the black guy playing a butler. I didn’t come here to do that. I came here to be a student.”

When the students were free to watch television, they would often see civil rights marches, and dogs being loosed on marchers, fire hoses aimed at them. Johnny remembers hearing comments like That’s what they get for trying to get out of place. “And I was making mental notes of who was saying what. I was kind of dividing them along those lines in my own mind and determining whether or not I was going to get along with certain people based on hearing those kinds of things. I don’t want to carry somebody’s laundry after I just heard him the day before disparaging black people.”

But the worst of it happened after dark. It started a couple of months after he arrived at school. Upperclassmen were allowed to stay up later than freshmen, and there were no locks on the doors. When he first told me the story, his voice tightened, and he began to cry. “I took a lot of beatings,” he said. “If you could imagine yourself being in bed asleep and somebody throwing your sheet over your head, and you’re suddenly being pummeled by a bunch of guys. That’s pretty intense. At 14 years old, feeling that you have no sanctuary at all, feeling that you’re really not safe from getting beat up and that you’re doing it not just for yourself but for a movement that’s larger than yourself, taking that kind of beating. It hurts when you get hit. Then you don’t sleep the rest of the night because you don’t know if they’re coming back. You’re crying. You’re angry. You’re hurt.” He spoke softly now, pausing between his words. The beatings happened four or five times during his first year. “It’s just a part of my experience there that I didn’t share with the other brothers that were there because I didn’t feel that that’s something we would have been able to talk about and do anything about.”

Johnny went home to Durham after his freshman year to a hero’s welcome. His grandmother, who every two weeks sent him $15, two-thirds of what she made as a housekeeper, took him to visit all her friends, beaming. He wanted to quit V.E.S. but couldn’t bear to disappoint her. And he thought of his forebears, like his great-grandmother, who was born a slave. “My great-grandmother had been alive until I was 5 or 6 years old,” he said. “So when I was at V.E.S. sitting in a classroom with white students whose grandparents and great-grandparents had owned slaves, I felt the real need to demonstrate that I was as good as they were.”

Johnny never considered going to the reunion, but he has begun to rethink his relationship with the school. “You know, when I think about V.E.S. now, without a doubt V.E.S. changed not just my life but the lives of my children and my grandchildren. I know the high schools I would have attended, and I know the high school I did attend,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s for everyone, being pulled away from home and forced to basically live independent of your family. But for me, I think it was a great experience and changed everything.” The greatest value, he said, was shaking off notions of white supremacy that he’d absorbed. He was as good or better than they were. “I wouldn’t trade the experience at all. It propelled me into a new place in life.”

I wondered how Johnny’s presence, the sacrifice of his own body, had affected the white people who he said beat him, two in particular. One of them is dead now, and the other, who lives in North Carolina, didn’t return my calls.

Jerrauld, Johnny’s roommate, slept beside him every night. Could he have missed the violence? He hadn’t mentioned anything at the reunion but was more forthcoming when I called him later. “I was aware of those two guys being standouts when it came to harassment that certainly had racial aspects to it,” he said. “And Johnny was not alone. They did some of the same things to me as well.” Though Johnny recalls suffering on his own, Jerrauld remembers talking with Johnny about the two boys who beat them, and yet a third antagonist. “He was particularly ugly from a racial perspective in his relations with us. And he was verbally abusive to me. And I remember lying in my bed one night, thinking to myself: I am going to kill this guy. That’s how much I don’t like him. I am going to kill this guy. And I started to plan how I was going to do it.” He was going to throw him off the top of the dormitory, but he told his mother, and she drove the 200 miles from Norfolk to comfort him.

He told me about a letter he received from a teacher named Rock Lee, who was also the school’s beloved football coach. “He was not well at the time. He was much older. And he wrote this letter of apology to me. When he found out all this stuff was going on” — Lee, he learned, had read a about a speech Jerrauld gave in the Virginia Legislature in which he recounted the difficulties of attending a mostly white school — “because he said that he had promised Austin Montgomery that he would protect us, that he would protect us from all this awful stuff. And when he found out that things were going on that he didn’t know about, he said, he cried.”

The Stouffer Foundation was aware of the risks its scholars faced. “I remember them saying that we would likely experience some very difficult days and some very ugly things,” Jerrauld said, “but that we always had to remember that the way to survive it was to make A’s in mathematics and English and chemistry and history. That is what I think they saw as the great social equalizer.”

In the summer of 1976, Forsyth gave in to repeated requests from her financial advisers to cut off monetary support to the program. The foundation sent a letter to the Stouffer alumni announcing the termination of the foundation. Ehle, the foundation’s executive director, began winding down the operation, writing students to ask about their college plans. With 20 prep schools newly open to blacks, Ehle also commissioned a study of the students at those schools who might have been affected by a program he called “the quietest, most successful integration program carried on in our country.” The Stouffer Questionnaire on Social Tolerance, as the survey came to be called, was designed to measure whether exposure had benefited students’ attitudes on race. It posed questions like:

I am no longer conscious of the race of students in prep school: Agree or Disagree?

I would object to a black student dating my sister: Agree or Disagree?

I believe another five years of social change may result in a greater degree of integration than we have now: Agree or Disagree?

In their answers, the students seemed to point out the implicit flaw in the Stouffer experiment. “I think that this test was a waste of time,” one student wrote. “There really aren’t enough blacks in this school for us to be able to answer the questions fairly.” Another echoed the same sentiment, criticizing not the project itself but its size. “Why the questionnaire on black students when there are only three in the whole school? Seems rather ridiculous. I hope something was gained by this because I think it’s silly.”

The Magnificent Seven hadn’t heard of the study until I told them about finding the dot matrix printouts in the University of North Carolina’s archives. I asked them whether they cared that their educations — and the personal costs some of them paid — had been an afterthought in this larger experiment in conditioning white Southerners to tolerate black children from a young age. “No, I never felt that way,” Bill told me. “I think I benefited from the V.E.S. educational experience. Did we contribute to changing the culture of the school? Sure.”

Some of their white classmates told me that knowing the seven changed them. But how do you quantify that? What’s easier to see is how the black students used the Stouffer experience to position themselves for success. As their lives progressed, each of them in his own way had to bring the bad that happened to accord with the good. I believe that’s a common refrain of many high-achieving black people in this country. In order to fully inhabit the bright parts of life — their educations, the friendships, the knowledge, the doors opened, the growth — they must own the darkness. Johnny told me I was the first person he had ever explored his feelings with. By the last time we spoke, he said he had made peace with what happened to him.

Whenever Jerrauld’s life takes him near Lynchburg, he visits V.E.S. for a walk around campus. “They were kids,” he told me, speaking of his white classmates. “I’m not giving them a complete pass on the bad things they did to us. But once they were put in the position of knowing that we were just like them or better than them academically, once they saw that, I think they had no other choice but to deal with us as people. There was this begrudged respect for us.” With time, the experiment became theirs, an attempt to wrest control from a world that didn’t always want to give it to them. “We were soldiers,” Jerrauld said, “on that little bitty battlefield.”